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Freedom is not choosing that is merely the move that we make when all is already lost. Freedom is knowing and understanding and respecting things quite other than ourselves.

Iris Murdoch

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Iris Murdoch
Age: 79 †
Born: 1919
Born: July 15
Died: 1999
Died: February 8
Author
Biographer
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
Professor
Prosaist
Writer
Dublin city
Jean Iris Murdoch
Dame Iris Murdoch
Knowing
Understanding
Freedom
Respecting
Moving
Choosing
Lost
Merely
Make
Move
Things
Already
Quite

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

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Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.
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Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.
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Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
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The chief requirement of the good life, is to live without any image of oneself.
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Of course men play roles, but women play roles too, blanker ones. They have, in the play of life, fewer good lines.
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The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.
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It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius when you're unknown.
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There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
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You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.
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Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.
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The very madness of the scheme protects it.
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So we live a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.
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there is a natural tribal hostility between the married and the unmarried. I cannot stand the shows so often quite instinctively put on by married people to insinuate that they are not only more fortunate but in some way more moral than you are.
Iris Murdoch
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Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
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Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life and that is why we adore them, but life as it is lived has no shape and meaning.
Iris Murdoch
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... half the world starves. What a planet. And the eating, if you're lucky enough to do any. Stuffing pieces of dead animals into a hole in your face. Then munch, munch, munch. If there's anybody watching, they must be dying of laughter.
Iris Murdoch
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There is nothing like early promiscuous sex for dispelling life's bright mysterious expectations.
Iris Murdoch
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Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness!
Iris Murdoch
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As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.
Iris Murdoch
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Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.
Iris Murdoch